What are narrative fractals?

Six elements can be found wherever we look carefully into what goes into (scale-insensitive) narratives of interaction.

These elements are:

* Attractor – interest-generating opener [emotion: curiousity]
* Challenge – disruptor of settled understandings/relationships [emotion: tension]
* Opportunity – vision of a desired outcome [emotion: inspiration]
* Strategy – path to realize vision [emotion: hope]
* Test – trial to confirm strategy [emotion: confidence]
* Decision – implement strategy, reframe/reloop, discard [emotion: resolve]

This pattern can be used to tag activities in physical and social realms, regardless the scale of the entities involved.

In social interactions with others, the narrative fractal pattern may influence what we opt to focus on as we quickly scan an environment. The narrative fractal elements also can be used in tagging (see http://j.mp/bTzT1W ) memorable conversations, in categorizing the assembly of conversations and events that make up subplots, in seeing the pattern that assemblies of subplots form to make up a story, in mapping the convergence of stories that comprise an epic, and in sensing how a combination of epics create an overarching belief system or a religion.

In scientific engagement with our environment, the narrative fractal can be described as:

attention->challenge->hypothesis->experimental design->trials->conclusion

In science, the assembly of small hypotheses and experiments on these lines similarly can scale to grand theories and to revolutions in scientific paradigms.

Such a scale-independent method of processing of experience also may have been at work in the evolution of organelles into single cells, cells into multicellular organisms, and multicellular organisms into complex beings.

Read more here.

See also: Is this what a Narrative Fractal looks like?